Even though he’s never been on Oprah or Conan,
Thomas Pynchon in arguably the most culturally significant American writer of
our time. Almost as famous for his reclusiveness as for his literary output,
Pynchon has never given a public appearance, never been interviewed, and hasn’t
had his picture taken since he was a teenager. Yet his influence ranges across
nearly all American media, even—especially—in areas that have never heard of
him.

Pynchon
emerged in 1963 when his first novel, V., revolutionized America’s
literary landscape. Taking the Modernism of James Joyce and William Faulkner on
its last steps into Postmodernism, Pynchon became a kind of icon for the 1960s,
and his outrageous style simply changed everything. In addition to being one of
the most staggeringly erudite humans beings on the planet, he was one of the
first American writers to take the subversive cultures cropping up around him
seriously, writing about conspiracies, alternative histories, and creepy
cabalistic systems. He also wrote about jazz, rock ’n’ roll, drugs, and sex,
but what distinguished him from the pedestrian decadence of the Beats (and
today’s Gen-Xers) is that he contrasted these depictions with advanced theories
of entropy and information. He didn’t glorify the emerging popular culture; he
chronicled it as a kind of increasing degeneration—a wild party that ultimately
robs us of our identity and replaces it with consumerism and conformity.

The ironic
and troubling thing about Pynchon—and America—is that the party is so damn
appealing. We love to buy into the latest rock band, pretending that we’re
rebelling as we keep our eyes glued to the tube. And it’s tempting to approach
Pynchon’s dissonant style as a kind of retreat from meaning, a sarcastic feast
of words and images that protects us from moving forward (the working title for
his masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow, is said to have been Mindless
Pleasures). Unfortunately, it’s this misreading of Pynchon that has
probably had the largest cultural impact. Pynchon gave us an alternative to
meaninglessness in his fiction, if only in glimpses, and now television has
appropriated his ironic, subversive style and used it to sell to us. If only we
buy a Subaru or Nike shoes, TV tells us, we’ll be able to stave off the empty,
decadent mob of faceless consumers and take our nonconformist stand.

So where
does this leave Pynchon? After changing the world with the novels V., The
Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow, he didn’t produce anything
new until seventeen years later, in the waning years of the Reagan era, when he
released the 1990 novel Vineland. Rumors abounded during his sabbatical:
He was burnt out; he was recovering from a bad acid trip; he had resumed
writing under his pseudonyms J.D. Salinger and William Gaddis. But the most
prevalent rumor was that he was working on a novel about the Mason-Dixon line.

The first
peep of the Mason-Dixon theory came out eighteen years ago, and so when Pynchon
released Vineland, critics unanimously cried, “What the hell is this?”
In Pynchon’s’ absence, such writers as William T. Vollmann, David Foster
Wallace, Richard Powers, and Carol DeChellis Hill had extended his legacy to
new lengths, and Vineland didn’t fare well in comparison to the work
they were producing. It was simply more of the same critiques of modern
culture—critiques that even television commercials had picked up on—and even
though most of it was right on the money, almost everybody wrote Pynchon off as
old and unhip.

So when
word started resurfacing again about the Mason-Dixon novel, some critics saw it
as a retreat from Pynchon’s stance as the oracle of modern culture. Was he
protecting himself from accusations of irrelevance by hiding behind a
historical novel? Or was this going to be an epic re-imagining of American
history the way Gravity’s Rainbow was? Now the wait—and the debate—is
over, because Pynchon has finally returned to release the awesome Mason
& Dixon.

Probably
twenty to twenty-five years in the writing, Mason & Dixon is
unequivocally worth the wait—and the weight (it’s almost 800 pages long). It
spans just twenty-five seminal years of American history (1761–1786), but it’s
one of the most powerfully modern visions of this country’s state of mind
since—well, since Gravity’s Rainbow. And Pynchon definitely has not lost
his contemporary edge: In surveying the story of Mason and Dixon, he
incorporates sly references to everything from the Three Stooges to Popeye to
Bill Clinton to Tammy Wynette.

The story
begins at its end—the Christmastide of 1786, when the exiled Reverend Wicks
Cherrycoke sits down to tell his Philadelphia family the story of Charles Mason
(1723–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779). Briefly starting with third-person
descriptions of the Reverend and his family, the novel then swings into
Cherrycoke’s weird, quasi-first-person account. He describes Mason and Dixon’s
first encounters with each other in England, their meeting with the Reverend
himself, and their mutual voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, where the pair is
sent to observe the Transit of Venus. The book soon shifts to an impossible
third-person narrative, however, with Cherrycoke recounting events he could
never have seen. His family calls him on it, and he laughs it off and quickly
changes the subject, so the reader is left with a constantly shifting—and
possibly unreliable—series of frames around the story.

So who is
the narrator—Pynchon or Cherrycoke? And what is our frame of reference—1761,
1786, or 1997? Despite all these shifts, Mason & Dixon is by far
Pynchon’s most accessible and linear novel to date. It follows just two
characters in a straight line as they survey their way across America. The
simplified structure might disappoint some Pynchon fans, but he makes up for it
with a richness and complexity of characterization that he could never have
achieved in his earlier years. And of course he gives readers a shitload of
intertextual games to play, referring at turns to such anachronistic authors as
Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, Julio Cortázar, and himself. Notice that the
Reverend Cherrycoke is probably an ancestor of Gravity’s Grainbow’s
Ronald Cherrycoke, and there’s also “Fender-Belly” Bodine, who’s presumably the
progenitor of Pynchon’s recurring character Pig Bodine.

After
their trip to the Cape of Good Hope, Mason and Dixon are separated briefly and
then sent together on a mission to America to survey the disputed border
between Pennsylvania and Maryland. Once in America, they descend into the
darkest, most Conradian reaches of the ostensible Age of Reason. But first they
have fun partying with George Washington, who really likes his hemp. The
novel’s most outrageous scene takes place when the future president gets Mason
and Dixon high and engages them in a spirited discussion with his slave
Gershom. The scene reaches a comic zenith when the faithful Martha Washington
comes running in with a tray of pastries for the party: “Smell’d that Smoak,
figured you’d be needing something to nibble on.”

As the two
men then set out to carve up the new world, they slowly realize they are simply
the tools of huge systems way beyond their comprehension. The narrative also
introduces more and more inexplicable phenomena—which Europe’s rationalism is
trying to eradicate—and the two astronomer/surveyors are forced to work as unwitting
missionaries against the nonrational. Along the line, they meet a group of
Presbyterian settlers who are “in Correspondence with the Elect Cohens of
Paris” and who apparently live near an enormous Golem. The Golem was created,
so say the Presbyterians, by a tribe of Native Americans believed to be one of
the Lost Tribes of Israel. The pair also comes up against a talking dog, an
amorous mechanical duck (both curiously the product of European
Enlightenment—the sleep of reason does produce monsters), and a field of
cathedral-sized vegetables.

Moving
steadily west, with numerous side trips and detours, Mason and Dixon begin to
question their mission, and strange memories surface to counter what science
tells them is reality: Dixon admits to knowing magical secrets passed down from
texts “rescued from the Library at Alexandria, circa 390 AD., before Christians
could quite destroy it all.” And Mason, in one of the novel’s most visionary
sections, remembers the mysterious eleven days between September 2nd and
September 14th, 1752, which Parliament had struck from the calendar to correct
astronomers’ mistakes. While everyone else went straight from the 2nd to the
14th, Mason lived the eleven days, roaming the streets in search of other lost
souls.

As we do
today, the people in the 18th century spent most of their free time
entertaining themselves with crappy art, and this is where Pynchon makes some
of his most pointed comments about America. Mason and Dixon get drawn into
reading a trashy serial called The Ghastly Fop, a serial that’s still
running when Cherrycoke tells his tale. At one point, Cherrycoke’s listeners
take time off and read to each other a section of The Ghastly Fop that
deals with a woman abducted by Jesuits and her escape from them with the help
of a Chinese feng shui master. As Cherrycoke resumes his narrative,
Pynchon makes his boldest move—bringing these two characters into the story of
Mason and Dixon. It’s an amazing comment on how history gets told, with
Cherrycoke working not only as Mason and Dixon’s Boswell, but as their Kinbote
too.

With the
two new characters playing crucial roles in Mason & Dixon’s
progression, the book shifts from being
Pynchon’s most traditional, old-fashioned novel to his most unabashedly
Postmodern. And it’s a complete success. Combining the best of all the
resources available to the modern novelist, Mason & Dixon is both
totally wacky and absolutely moving, proving not only that Pynchon has
progressed to new levels of maturity, but that he’s still as radical as ever.